Leila Aboulela

At first Shadia was afraid to ask him for his notes. The earring made her afraid; the straight long hair that he tied up with a rubber band. She had never seen a man with an earring and such long hair. But then she had never known such cold, so much rain. His silver earring was the strangeness of the West, another culture shock. She stared at it during classes, her eyes straying from the white scribbles on the board. Most times she could hardly understand anything. Only the notation was familiar. But how did it all fit together? How did this formula lead to this? Her ignorance and the impending exams were horrors she wanted to escape. His long hair was a dull colour between yellow and brown. It reminded her of a doll she had when she was young. She had spent hours combing that doll's hair, stroking it. She had longed for such straight hair. When she went to Paradise she would have hair like that. When she ran it would fly behind her, if she bent her head down it would fall over her like silk and sweep the flowers on the grass. She pictured her doll, vivid suddenly, and felt sick that she was daydreaming in class, not learning a thing.

The first days of the term, when the classes started for the M.Sc. in Statistics, she was like someone tossed around by monstrous waves-battered, as she lost her way to the different lecture rooms, fumbled with the photocopying machine, could not find anything in the library. She could scarcely hear or eat or see. Her eyes bulged with fright, watered from the cold. The course required certain background, background she didn't have. So she floundered, she and the other African students, the two Turkish girls, and the man from Brunel. Asafa, the short, round-faced Ethiopian, said, in his grave voice—as this collection from the Third World whispered their anxieties in grim Scottish corridors, the girls in nervous giggles—"Last year, last year, a Nigerian on this very same course committed suicide. Cut his wrists."